Tony Khan
speaker
120 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Tony Khan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
When you have a setback, reset your clock.
AEW is a challenger brand competing in an industry where the industry leader historically has been the most adept company at crippling and smashing their competitors in the history of business. I found it very interesting what was happening with the media rights in the wrestling business.
The rights fees for the wrestling shows went up, and it was really only one company that was producing that product at the time, and that was WWE. It occurred to me that somebody could launch a new wrestling promotion. Now, AEW, in 2025, we're on over 150 countries now.
Well, you have to build credibility and the best way to do that is.
Thank you for having me. It's very kind of you and I'm excited to be on the show and great to see you.
Growing up as a kid, I was really obsessed with television and exciting television. And sports is, to me, the most exciting television. But I watched a lot of TV and I watched a lot of sports and I watched a lot of cartoons and action shows. So I watched G.I. Joe and the host of G.I. Joe, and he was a character in the show, was Sergeant Slaughter. And Sergeant Slaughter is also a wrestler.
So that helped me start to watch wrestling. I also watched The A-Team, which is a great show. I don't know if you watched The A-Team, but it was a fantastic show.
Yeah, sure. First was a great show. That's not as much the stuff I was into, though. I did like some cartoons. I like more superheroes, the Justice League, Super Friends, but also a lot of action shows like The A-Team, which was a great show. And... Hulk Hogan was a character that appeared sometimes as Hulk Hogan on the A-Team.
And he was supposed to be a friend who was in Vietnam with Mr. T, which is pretty unbelievable in hindsight, given their ages and time with this show. But AEW was something that I dreamed of for many, many years. I grew up as a kid loving pro wrestling. I started watching TV as a kid. I had a TV in my room and my parents had a satellite dish in the backyard in the 80s.
No, my parents liked sports. I grew up in Champaign, Illinois, and the University of Illinois sports are a huge part of living in central Illinois. People follow Illinois football and basketball really closely. So I grew up watching a lot of football and basketball, especially the Illini, but also the NFL and the NBA and followed other sports too, baseball and soccer and other things.
And I really grew up as a big fan of wrestling above all else, as a huge sports fan collecting cards. But the one sport that never ends, there's no off season. It goes 365 days a year, does not take a break. 52 weeks a year of pro wrestling. There's no reruns. It's new wrestling every week. And that really, as you're a big sports fan kid, can keep you hooked on that.
So when the NFL goes on break after the Super Bowl and when college basketball breaks after March Madness, you don't really get that 52-week-a-year chance to really follow something you love. And wrestling does offer that.
My dad is a very successful businessman. And as I was growing up, he was really building his business day by day, week by week. And there was a lot of work he put into it, but he was also away working a lot. So I did see my dad as much as he could, but he was... working hard building his business up and traveling the world.
And my dad is a big sports fan, took me to games, built his auto parts empire, and started companies, built new factories all over the world, and eventually was able to buy the NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars in 2012. And it was many years building towards that. But when I was growing up as a little kid, it seemed like an impossibility.
But definitely my dad always loved football as far as I remember and was great about taking me to sports when he was around.
Yeah, I definitely had some pressure from my parents to do something of significance in their eyes. There was academic pressure, but also pressure to go out and do something important at work. So I really love my parents very much. And they're very hardworking people and very smart people, but they are very motivated and they motivated me.
Well, I changed majors at the University of Illinois. I was in engineering school. For me, yeah, I always thought I would go into business and I was in engineering school and it's a lot of work. And I was having a lot of fun in college and also doing things like writing wrestling shows for fun and trading wrestling tapes and posting on wrestling message boards and watching lots of basketball.
The Illinois basketball team was really, really good when I was there and watching lots of football and going to the football games. And it was a lot of work in engineering school and also a lot of the stuff I really wanted to learn, I was learning in my minor, which was finance. And they called it the secondary field of concentration. So my secondary field, I found far more interesting.
And also I found that I could manage my studies and still do all the other things I wanted to do and be a solid student, but also go out several days a week
I was so much happier instantly. I enjoyed the classes more. I had so much more free time and I saw my friends more and it was fantastic. I learned things that I apply more and I took a few years of the engineering classes. I have an insane amount of math credits. for somebody that graduated with the degree I have. So I could go back and do something with them sometime.
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